By Valson Thampu
Should the late E. Ahmed have died in the early hours of the 1st of February? Was it a willful unpatriotic act on his part? Unfortunately, human beings don’t have much control over their hearts. Especially, when the time comes and refuses to wait.
What is worse I now wonder: politicizing death or medicalizing it? If your death is politicized you continued to be argued about by those who care two hoots for you. If your death is medicalized, you are packed off from the ICCU to the trauma centre with both eyes plastered down by those who care every hoot for someone else. You are torn away from your dear ones by the docs who become, depending on the context, more zealous than death itself on when you should die. They decide if you should have the luxury of having a last glimpse of your dear ones. Especially, if your death happens to be timed awkwardly with Budget.
Budget, in case you don’t know, means buget, which was a purse attached to the belt of a trader. It held money. That is what budget is about: money, money, money. Everyone is obsessed with it, not because they love the music of the word, but because they put their heart where the money.
What are you to do, if you have to choose between a fellow human being and money? That’s a question not to be asked. Why waste time on the obvious?
No one would have expected the Budget to be postponed. That was not in the reckoning at all. But some of us would have liked a dying old man, even if he were not a former Union Minister, to be treated a trifle more humanely. We could have afforded it, you know? The gratuitous aggression, the pointless crudity, of it is what shocks. It was callousness for the sake of callousness.
We would have liked Ahmed’s eyes to close under happier circumstances. After all, even when you go on a short journey your dear ones tell you, “Good bye, have a safe journey”. No? Here was a journey from which the traveller was not likely to return. And he left, staring at masked faces, frozen in the callousness we are pleased to call professionalism. Much rather die all, all alone in a gutter.
Medical ethics used to recognize and respect the impenetrable mystery of the last final moments of a person’s life. Those hours are imperiously his. Don’t restrain him; he is going any way. No man, no doctor, no nurse, no bouncer or no whispering mouth even from the PMO has any authority over it. It is a crime to snatch the meaning of those mysterious moments from anyone. Not even thieves do that. Even on the battlefield, the dying are respected. It is a medical scandal.
Doctors are servants of life. Now some of them behave like rulers of life. They decide when you should die, how you should, and if you should die alone or with the hand of a loved one closing your eyes with fingers that weep.
I remember witnessing an accident in which a dog, which was sleeping under a parked car, got run over and killed. Its mate heard the squeal, came running and lay herself down beside the carcass, whining. Even a dog senses something about death that has a meaning, an eternal echo, far beyond its own life. What a pity we are not dogs.
Tradition has it that if you chance upon an enemy who is dying, you moisten his lips if he is thirsty. No excuse, please! He must be your absolute priority. Only once in his life is a common man king; that’s the hour of his death. No one should treat him like a baggage of inconvenience and push him, if reports are indeed correct, to a trauma centre to complete a charade.
What was the need to send a dead body to trauma centre anyway, if indeed that’s what happened? When the trauma of death has already trundled over his body? Unless it is to traumatize the living who are, at any rate, already in the gentle and comforting arms of your “bouncers”?
Bouncers at Intensive Coronary Care Units? What a wry sense of humor! It takes imagination of a surgical strike kind to connect “intensive care” with the skills of bouncers.
The disgraceful drama at RML Hospital was eminently avoidable. That’s what makes it all the more unnerving. It was up to the Government to go ahead with the Budget presentation. When you are in a position to steamroll the opposition, why let small things discompose you? This is a riddle wrapped in an enigma.
This matter has significance not only for the deceased, or his grieving and aggrieved relatives, but for all of us. Because events like this unmask the reality that is already grinning, like Yorik’s skull, at all of us. It’s me today. You? Just wait. Till tomorrow. In the meanwhile let’s organize ourselves better and count our taxes and coins (now plastic money) diligently. It is another matter that our long-term gain, if indeed there’[s such a thing, begins to rain only after death.
Remember how clinically the family members of the retired Jawan –Ram Kishan Grewal- who killed himself for OROP on 2 November 2016 were treated? The same RML Hospital was then too the theatre of bared knuckles, so to speak, against the bereaved. Then too, the shell-shocked relatives were sent to a ‘trauma centre’. When it comes to grieving, what difference does it make where you are? A police station is as good as a park, no?
The message is loud and clear: life is cheap my friend. Well, that happens when money is god. The choice all through history has been between man and money. Against money we never stood a ghost of a chance. It’s nothing new.
Would the eerily competent doctors of RML Hospital please tell us: Do you still swear by the Hippocratic Oath? Some forty years ago I attended an annual conference of the Indian Association for the Advancement of Medical Education. The late Ajit Panja, then a Minister in the Central Government, was the chief guest. He turned a trifle rhetorical in saluting his august audience, “Distinguished disciples of Hypocrites…” Small difference, but disastrous consequences.
Will medical ethics be wire-pulled from a distance? Is packing off critically ill patients to the Trauma Centre be henceforth the set protocol? A new national drill: all shall go through the Trauma Centre? Will medical ethics be wire-pulled from a distance? Will packing off critically ill patients –who are actually dead- to the Trauma Centre be henceforth the set protocol? A new national drill: dead or alive, all shall go through the Trauma Centre?
On the one hand there is the stark reality of cheapening life and subjugating it to political expediency. On the other, there is the enforced fervor of springing to your feet in a cinema hall when the national anthem is sung. Between the two fluctuates the fever of patriotism.
One last word. The word “hospital” comes from the same root as “hospitality”. In its historical origin -which goes back to 12th Century AD, Italy- “hospital” was a “place of welcome”. Hospital then was a place where the poor, homeless people went, irony of ironies, to die in dignity. Now the poor die in dignity at home and the rest die in the distinction that hospitals like RML thrust on them at their extinction. Welcome to the trauma centre. This way, if you please.
Dante Alighieri had the following words written at the entrance of hell in Divine Comedy: “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”
(Valson Thampu is the immediate past president of St Stephen’s College, Delhi)